Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, companies utilizing e-commerce websites often do not have a physical store or location where a salesperson can help both novice and knowledgeable customers find sought-after products. Instead, a customer navigating an e-commerce website typically attempts to identify a product that meets the customer's needs. Even a customer with considerable experience navigating e-commerce websites sometimes experiences difficulty in locating a desired product from among hundreds or thousands of offered products. For novice customers, meanwhile, the task of shopping online via the web can be unproductive and even frustrating.
In response to these difficulties, these companies continually strive to make their e-commerce websites more dynamic, compelling, and easier for users to navigate and locate products. To help meet these goals, these companies endeavor to not only simplify a customer's experience in locating a particular product, but also endeavor to simplify a customer's experience in locating relating products. For instance, if a topic of “fitness” interests a particular customer, then an e-commerce company typically desires to display to the particular customer a variety of related products that relate to this topic.
One recent innovation allows customers to search for a product by tags associated with that product. Tags essentially enable customers, the e-commerce company, or some other entity the ability to easily categorize products. For instance, a customer who has purchased a certain fitness-related book may tag this book as relating to “fitness”. When the particular customer discussed above then conducts a tag search based on “fitness”, this book will appear in a returned listing of products along with other related products. While tagging and other recent innovations have proven very successful, e-commerce companies continue to explore techniques to enable customers to more easily locate related products.